Existing control and calibration techniques for printing systems suffer from image quality (IQ) problems. Three well known IQ problems relating to control and calibration are: instability of the print engine, low quality of color balance, and contouring from the calibration and real-time recalibration. For example, printing systems with a high inter-separation interaction and a steep engine response tone reproduction curve (TRC) are prone to these image quality defects. Particularly, for the commonly used graphic arts quality byte-wide image path, 256 halftone levels are chosen from thousands available in a basic dot, so that the halftone levels are substantially equally spaced for human visual perception. The steep natural response of the printing systems and the variability in the position of the native tone curve requires that some of the 256 halftone levels must be allocated to regions into which the imaging process may drift. This can result in greater visual spacing between the halftone levels. Doing calibration using an 8 bit lookup table (LUT) means removing some halftone levels to locally steepen the natural engine response and replicating other halftone levels to locally soften the engine response. This process can lead to discontinuities (contours). Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a method of printer control or calibration and color balancing that addresses the problems of print engine instability, low color balance quality and contouring.